Week 3 - Joanne Agus

This week’s readings cover the factors that come to play when Asian Americans apply to higher education – from unraveling the discriminative backfiring effect of affirmative actions to understanding the background and demographic of Asian American’s college choices.

Nancy Chung’s article Asian Americans and Affirmative Action: From Yellow Peril to Model Minority Myth and Back Again opened my eyes on understanding more about affirmative actions (Chung, 2007).  When I first applied to universities in the States I was not aware of the backfiring effects of using affirmative actions to “benefit” minorities. In fact, I first thought that such policy would be beneficial for minorities like me in applying to colleges in the states. Yet a factor that I forgot was that I would be accepted as an international student, and not an Asian American. Yes, it makes sense for universities to have some sort of double standard for international students because the way we measure our GPA and our results of the standardized test cannot be measured in the same scale as those from a US education background, thus this form of affirmative action would actually provide a somewhat equal opportunity for international students in getting into colleges.

Another point that I find particularly interesting in the reading is Chung’s argument on how discussing and creating the idea of affirmative action itself highlights the differences between Asian Americans and Whites in terms of education. While this is may be true, I think that she brought up an even more important idea to tackle discrimination against Asian Americans, which is to stop the belief of model minority and clumping Asian Americans as one group. I believe that by understanding the Asian American communities in a deeper level would help universities understand that affirmative actions shouldn’t only focus on Asian Americans as a whole, rather their socio economic group, backgrounds, and to and extent, every student’s individual stories.

The picture bellow comes from one of the student organization in the University of Texas as they show how affirmative actions results to "reverse discrimination". I believe that this is somehow too simple of a depiction of affirmative actions, and can be dangerous in making the society oblivious of the reason why affirmative actions were first created. 

(Kingkade, 2007)

Q: Because Chung's article was published in 2007 ( a decade ago), how are universities now applying affirmative actions. How to they aim to accept students across multiple backgrounds fairly without discriminating one or the other?

References:

Chung Allred, N. (2007). Asian Americans and Affirmative Action: From Yellow Peril to Model Minority and Back Again. Asian American Law Journal, 14(3). Retrieved from http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/aalj/vol14/iss

Kingkade, T. (2013). University of Texas Conservative Students Hold Affirmative Action Bake Sale [digital image]. Retrieved 16th of April, 2017 from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/01/affirmative-action-bake-sale_n_4025362.html